


Turning Page

by bluenebulae



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Writing & Publishing, F/M, Take Your Fandom to Work Day, mentions of drug abuse, mentions of ramsay and ramsay-related things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-25 14:40:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19747795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluenebulae/pseuds/bluenebulae
Summary: The last thing overworked book publicist Sansa needs on her plate is a moody, reticent author with a controversial debut. But that's exactly what she gets when Theon Greyjoy's novel starts lighting the literary world on fire--and they might both have to learn not to judge a book by its cover.





	Turning Page

**Author's Note:**

> warning: this depicts a COMPLETELY INACCURATE author-publicist relationship. real life is 100% less romantic and 100% more people not answering your emails. 
> 
> i have always wanted to do a take your fandom to work day - i know this is belated, but i had to get the job first ✨

It’s 3:17 on a Friday afternoon when Sansa’s phone rings. In her mind, it’s already the weekend, and it startles her so much to realize she’s _not_ hurtling toward her parents’ house in Vermont on an Amtrak but instead still stuck in her pristine cubicle in Manhattan that she actually jumps. For a few moments, she considers not even picking up, but when she sees the caller ID she fumbles for the phone before it goes to voicemail.

“Hi Sansa,” says a lilting voice. “Happy weekend.”

“Not quite yet.” Sansa leans back in her chair. “How are you, Margaery?”

“Oh, you know. Work is work. Fashion Week was exquisite this year, at least. Listen, what are the chances of getting Theon Greyjoy on in the next couple weeks?”

Sansa’s about to press Margaery on details of her brother’s latest runway when the second half of her words sink in. “Theon Greyjoy?” she repeats slowly, praying she had misheard or maybe Margaery had just gotten the name confused with another one of her authors, though she knows deep down that Margaery doesn’t get confused.

“Yeah, Greyjoy. _Everyone_ ’s been talking about _What Is Dead May Never Die_ here. I was up ‘til one-thirty last night reading it. How’d you guys find him?”

“The book isn’t out for another month,” Sansa says, dazed. Truthfully, she hasn’t done more with the manuscript than skim it yet. It’s a debut, and Brienne had said they weren’t pushing for bestseller list with it, which was enough to shove it to the bottom of the tall stack of sheaves of paper sitting on her nightstand at home. And after she’d met the author, she’d had even less desire to ever pick the manuscript up again.

“How’d you even get hold of it?”

“Renly got a galley from someone or other. I had to beg it off him, practically.”

 _Daenerys_. Sansa groans, cursing the overeager editor in her head. This is why _she_ likes to be the one sending out the advance copies. Dany seems determined to make the novel into a blowout success, even if nobody else on the team agrees with her.

“What about another author?” Sansa asks desperately. “What’s the show on? I could get you someone way better. Bronn Blackwater has another financial self-help book out—”

“Nope, we want Theon. Come on, Sansa, we want to get him before the book blows up. How well does he interview?”

 _Blows up_? What? Sansa very nearly bites out the response she wats to give—she has no idea how well Theon interviews, because the one brief meeting she’d had with him when she was assigned to be a publicist for his debut novel was so teeth-grindingly annoying that she doesn’t even want to think about it, much less get him back in the office for interview prep. But then she remembers she’s on the phone with Margaery Tyrell and not Arya or Robb and she bites her tongue.

“He can…talk,” she says lamely.

“Good! That’s a good start. I have faith you’ll get him there, Sansa. You always do.”

“Are you sure you don’t want Bronn? His new investment tips are _really_ —”

“Just you and Theon Greyjoy’s smiling faces in my studio a week from Tuesday. Lovely as ever, Sansa!”

The dial tone sounds, and Sansa buries her head in her hands to muffle her groan.

Apparently not well enough, though. She hears footsteps, and a moment later Brienne’s face appears over the top of her cubicle wall. “Sansa? Are you okay?”

“Margaery Tyrell wants Theon Greyjoy on _Mornings with Margaery_ a week from Tuesday,” Sansa says weakly. “It’s live.”

“Oh.” Brienne presses her lips together, trying to hide her surprise, but Sansa doesn’t miss the way her eyebrows shoot up.

“Yeah.”

“I guess you’ve got your work cut out for you. Sorry, Sansa.”

Brienne’s voice is genuinely sympathetic. It softens the blow a bit. Sansa still sighs, though.

“It’s okay. I knew what I was getting myself into.” _Kind of_.

Reluctantly, she picks up her phone again and starts tapping in her mother’s number. It looks like she won’t make it home for Bran’s birthday this weekend, after all.

-

It’s not that Sansa’s first meeting with Theon Greyjoy was _inappropriate_ or anything. She’d had those kinds of authors before, usually the older men who penned huge tomes of history or ultra-literary fiction or political treatises, who would openly ogle her legs in her pencil skirts or make lewd comments about teaching her a thing or two about the size of their ‘authorial presence.’ Nearly as bad were the overeager ones who would come in brimming with ideas about making it to Oprah’s book club and having twenty-city book signing tours across America. Some of the particularly enthusiastic ones would try to book their own interviews, tying Sansa up in cyclical conference calls for afternoons at a time.

Theon Greyjoy, though, was none of these. Theon was Sansa’s least favorite kind of author: the kind who simply didn’t care.

Sansa had never understood how an author could spend so much time drafting and polishing a novel, finding an agent, negotiating a contract, toiling through round after round of painstaking edits, and then _not_ want to talk about their work. Some of them came in with the notion that they could carry off a Donna Tartt-esque level of enigmatic reclusiveness, to which Sansa always pointed out that they had not written _The Goldfinch_. Theon hadn’t even been that, though. He blustered into the conference room twenty minutes late, flung himself across a chair, and, without even removing his sunglasses, asked “What am I here for?”

Sansa was, at first, thrown for a loop. It was still quite early in the morning, despite his tardiness, and she hadn’t yet downed her requisite three cups of coffee. But her surprise quickly shifted to indignance as Theon continued to watch her from behind the dark glass.

“Hello to you too,” she had answered primly, and stuck out her hand for him to shake. “I’m your publicist, Sansa. I’m here to get the word out about your book and help you get ready to do so, too.”

Theon had snorted at that, and Sansa remembers feeling herself blush in anger, a reaction she’d always hated having.

“Dany said you hadn’t lined up any interviews for me.”

“Well, not yet. We’re still a few months out from the pub date, and it’s a small debut—“

“So what am I here for, then?”

Sansa knew her cheeks had reddened even further. The knowledge, instead of making her embarrassed, fueled her anger. Who was this man—this cocky debut author with those _stupid_ shades and that _stupid_ smirk—to waltz in here and question Sansa’s competency? What gave him the right to question her workflow?

“I want to have a trial interview with you,” Sansa had said, excruciatingly careful to lock the annoyance away and regulate her tone to be pleasant. She didn’t entirely succeed, and she actually saw Theon Greyjoy’s lips quirk up further at the crack in her demeanor. He’s enjoying this, Sansa had realized. _Dick_. “Before I begin reaching out to media contacts, I want to find out what medium you’ll be best in for press. Written, televised, maybe even radio. I have a list of questions—”

“But there _aren’t_ any interviews. Are there?”

“No, because I haven’t booked them yet,” Sansa retorted through gritted teeth.

“And there won’t be.”

“You need to be patient—”

“Do you even know what the book’s about?”

Sansa had fallen silent, duly chagrined.

“Look, I know the book doesn’t have a big budget. Dany told me. You don’t have to waste your time coddling me.” Theon had leaned forward in his chair, his glasses sliding down his nose just enough that Sansa could finally see his eyes. She was startled to see how bright they were—stormy blue-green and so intense that she couldn’t look away, even through her disgust with every other aspect of him.

“If you guys don’t want to put energy into the book, I get it. It’s a controversial subject, whatever. Just don’t jerk me around. I’m sure you’re a busy lady, Sansa; don’t waste your time with me.”

He was gone so fast that Sansa hadn’t had a chance to come up with any kind of response before the glass door to the conference room was clicking shut, leaving her feeling pissed and, oddly enough, a little guilty.

Now, the misplaced guilt returns in thick waves as Sansa composes an email to Theon’s agent, letting them know about the details of Margaery’s television show. She hesitates before hitting ‘send’ and then keys the word ‘urgent’ in front of the subject line. If her next encounter with Theon Greyjoy is anywhere near as bad as the first, she’ll need all the time she can get.

-

Sansa had suggested a coffee shop as the location of their trial interview. It was more neutral ground than the huge, glassy skyscraper her publishing company occupied; it would have been even more intimidating on the Sunday morning she’d selected, all empty and cold. Here, at least, the background noise of New York City life could fill in for any awkward silences—of which she was sure there would be many.

She’d tried to read _What Is Dead May Never Die_ again, she really had, but just as she had settled down with it the previous day Bronn Blackwater’s agent had called flipping out about a vaguely negative review in some magazine or other and Sansa had to talk him down off a cliff while scouring the internet for said review—which ended up originating from a no-name newspaper somewhere in Oregon. Then her mother had called and Sansa had gotten swept up in apologies for missing Bran’s birthday, which had been, by all accounts, the kind of wholesome, soothing family affair she could have really used at the moment. When she finally got off the phone with them, she was two glasses of wine deep and halfway through an existential crisis about whether her career was consuming her life as badly as Arya claimed it was.

She’d managed to work through one chapter of the novel before she’d passed out on the couch. It had been a confusing one, full of blunt prose and bizarre metaphors about deep sea creatures and reincarnation, and if possible, it had made Sansa even less confident in the day’s meeting than she already had been.

She sits at a table at the front of the café, oversized shades covering her dark circles, tracing a finger around the rim of her coffee cup as she waits for Theon to appear. The manuscript lays on the table before her. Sansa wonders why, if Theon was obviously never intending to show up on time in the first place, he’d agreed to meeting at such an ungodly hour of the morning.

Maybe he was planning to stand her up. Sansa wouldn’t put it past him.

Just as she’s debating whether to chalk it up as a loss, pay for her overpriced latte, and go back to bed, a messy-haired man pushes through the door of the café and glances around before his attention settles on her. He’s got the shades on again but this time, he’s dressed in the black-leather-and-denim uniform of every Brooklynite under thirty-five. Sansa suppresses her eye roll.

Maybe it’s the early hour, or the fact that it’s a weekend and she should be asleep, or her worries from the night before crowding into her mind again, but it’s about all the polite suppression she can manage. “Thanks so much for being punctual,” she bites out as Theon slumps into the chair across from her.

“Hello, Sansa. Lovely to see you too. You look ravishing this morning.”

“Cut it out.” Sansa reaches for the stack of papers and shuffles them so that the manuscript is at the bottom, mostly so that her hands have something to do. “We don’t have a lot of time. I don’t know why, but Margaery Tyrell is desperate to have you on _Mornings with Margaery_ and she needs you there in a little over a week. I’m sure you know what a big deal that is.”

“Actually, no. I don’t watch a lot of talk shows, I’m afraid.”

“It’s _not_ a—” Sansa stops, takes two deep breaths in through her nose, channels the calming voice in one of Bran’s weird meditation tapes.

“Theon,” she says once she collects herself, “this could make your book a bestseller. Nearly one million people watch Margaery’s show every morning. Seven times that many will see it through her social media accounts. She’s a trendsetter. The amount of exposure this will net you is, quite frankly, insane for the type of book this is.”

A waiter comes and sets a steaming mug of black coffee in front of Theon, which he proceeds to douse with creamer. He stirs it languidly, then removes his sunglasses and hooks them through his jacket pocket, before finally turning his gaze back to Sansa. His eyes, she notices, are bloodshot.

“And what kind of book is that?”

“A small debut from an unknown author with little commercial appeal and very controversial subject matter.”

“You mean one that doesn’t matter.”

“Well, it looks like it matters to Margaery Tyrell.” Sansa avoids giving Theon the line about how _all_ books matter to the company; she has a feeling he won’t buy it, and besides, every time she repeats it, the words feel like ashes in her mouth. She desperately wishes she could dedicate herself fully to every single title, no matter how small, that lands in her inbox, but there are only so many minutes in her day and only so many magazines and talk shows and celebrities who only can take one of her titles.

This, though, is a golden opportunity, and she’ll be damned if she lets Theon Greyjoy squander it.

“Since you’re actually going to be in front of a real-life camera this time in a matter of days, I hope you’ll take it seriously,” Sansa says, riffling to her list of practice questions.

Theon tilts his chin in a small nod. “Hit me.”

“What was your inspiration for writing _What Is Dead May Never Die?”_

He shrugs. “Saw a couple strung-out junkies on the street in Greenpoint one night.”

“ _Theon._ ”

“What?”

“You can’t just—” _Meditation videos. Rainbows and weird geometric shapes and windchimes,_ Sansa thinks.

“There _are_ a bunch of junkies in Greenpoint. What, you think I’m not telling the truth?”

“You can’t just say it like that!” she bursts out. “You have to be empathetic. And relatable, and eloquent.”

“What, all at once?”

Sansa ignores him. “You want to make it more of an anecdote. Viewers will relate to you more that way. And don’t say ‘junkies,’ say ‘individuals struggling with addiction’ or something.”

“Alright then. I was stumbling back from the bar piss-drunk on a Tuesday when I saw a couple _individuals struggling with addiction_ hanging out on Franklin Avenue.” Theon takes a long sip of coffee and ponders the ceiling above Sansa’s head before adding, “They looked cold.”

“Great,” Sansa says, not bothering to keep sarcasm from tinging it. “I’ll mark that one down as ‘work in progress.’ Can you tell me what kinds of research you did for the novel? Some of the descriptions are…vivid.”

They go back and forth like that for the better part of an hour, Sansa lobbing questions and Theon deflecting them with a joke or pithy comment as regularly as he actually answers them. She watches carefully for tics, verbal cues, anything that could indicate nervousness or discomfort with a subject matter, but Theon Greyjoy’s got a personal shield up over his emotions that’s incredibly impressive to Sansa, who had come from a family so full of shouting, brooding, and emotional instability that a week in the Stark household didn’t seem right without at least one crisis. She just can’t figure out what’s beneath it—at least, not for most of the interview.

The first time the shield slips and she glimpses the real Theon Greyjoy is near the end of their two hours, when she asks him “what made you want to be an author?”

“It…” Theon won’t meet her gaze, his eyes darting all around the coffee shop before landing in his lap. It’s something Sansa has noticed he often does when he doesn’t have a pithy answer. “It’s helped me—writing this book specifically has helped me—work through some really tough shit in my life. It all looks different when you put it down on paper. It’s easier to see the problems, the bad habits and the repercussions. So it’s intensely personal in a lot of ways.”

Sansa pauses a moment, surprised. After so many casual deflections, she hadn’t expected anything genuine to leave his mouth this morning. But when Theon looks back up from his lap, she can see her shock mirrored on his face, mixed with an intense note of fear. She has the odd impulse to reach out, take his hand, and comfort him.

Instead, she pushes her hair back and returns to scribbling. “Good. But try not to curse on live TV.”

-

That night, Sansa curls up on the couch with _What Is Dead May Never Die_ and doesn’t get up again until she’s read the entire thing. It’s not a particularly long book, probably due to Theon’s stark, no-nonsense prose, but once Sansa adjusts to his strange style and pushes past the first few chapters, she’s hooked.

She sees now why everyone had such a hard time defining it. On one level, it’s about drug addiction; on another, about the formation of identity after trauma; on a deeper one still, about rebirth, not in the universal karmic sense but on a personal scale that manages to strip away any cheesy new-wave implications.

It’s the kind of book Sansa imagines could have very easily been written off as pure pretension, but the way Theon writes is so matter-of-fact that she can’t imagine anyone deriding him as another David Foster Wallace wannabe. It’s authentic in a way that very few books, especially fiction novels, ever are.

It’s also completely umarketable.

Sansa understands Brienne’s reluctance when the title is brought up better than she did before. She has no doubt that meticulous Brienne had given the manuscript a decently thorough read as soon as it had been greenlighted, and thus she’d understood both Theon’s brilliance and his transgressiveness. Books on drug abuse—especially drugs as hard as the ones in Theon’s novel—are still a tough sell for publicity and, if handled incorrectly, could land the author and the publishing house in hot water. The best Theon could probably hope for is a word-of-mouth cult following.

Except Margaery Tyrell thought it could be something much bigger, and now Sansa does, too.

-

They start meeting every other day. Sansa usually doesn’t meet with authors that frequently, but Theon’s manuscript had intrigued her. She schedules the meetings; Theon picks the locations. He keeps his selections to moody coffee shops and parks, to Sansa’s relief; she had made it a point to avoid meeting authors in bars after one too many had gotten the wrong impression. It’s still slow going with him, but something had changed in Theon since the news of Margaery’s interest in the book. His disdain had been replaced with a nonchalance that does less and less to cover his nervousness as the days go on. At their second meeting, Sansa sees his genuine smile for the first time as she tells him how she’d raced through his book, a flash of bright teeth that transforms his hardened face into boyishness. At their third, he pulls out his phone to note down some of the tips Sansa gives him on speaking and posture. Their fourth, a Friday afternoon rendezvous at the elevated park that runs up the West Side, goes nearly twice as long as it was supposed to; Theon is eager now, and perched on the bench above 23rd Street watching the cars zip by below them, Sansa realizes she’s actually grown comfortable with the man. His walls have come down, and it’s not only easier for her to do her job, but easier as well to see the mind that had produced such a gripping work of literature.

There’s still one sticking point, though.

“Go over the inspiration question again,” Sansa says, stretching her legs out and hooking her heels onto the railing.

Theon groans. “Come on, Sansa. You’ve heard it a hundred times.”

“And it still sounds wooden. Margaery’s definitely going to ask about it, and probably at the beginning. If you don’t nail it then the entire rest of the interview will sound inauthentic.”

“I don’t know what else I can say.” Theon rakes his hands through his hair, mussing his already-tangled curls even further. “It’s not like it’s a long story, I don’t know. I just…saw them, huddled there. And they looked sad. Broken.”

All the ease drains from his face as he speaks. His left hand begins to twitch; Sansa swears she can _see_ Theon retreat into himself, dragging that shield firmly back up to cover whatever it is about this story he’s hiding.

She’s not a therapist. She has no clue what’s going on inside his mind. But she does know one thing: Theon can’t face the camera like this, the anxiety of being filmed combining with whatever this discomfort is to create the perfect storm for a primetime breakdown in Sansa’s imagination.

Okay, so they’ll just have to figure out how to deflect the question really well. Sansa can do that. She can work it out for him. She just needs a little more time, and she’s already late.

She stands, pulling her shades down as Theon startles.

“Come on. Brienne’s out for the afternoon, and we can use her office.”

-

Theon looks out of place in the polished marble lobby of Westeros Publishing Group. His leather jacket seems dirtier in contrast to the suits and high heels swarming around him, and he’s still avoiding everyone’s gaze, his fingers tapping a frenetic rhythm against his jeans. Sansa again has a completely irrational impulse—this time to fold her fingers over his to still the nervous movement.

By the time the elevator slides open with a gush of cool air, she’s wondering if this wasn’t a mistake after all.

But they’re here now, and Sansa plasters on a smile as she pushes the button for the thirty-fifth floor. Theon’s nervous expression has begun to take on a slightly nauseous edge.

“You’ve been here before, right?” she asks, trying to break the silence.

Theon nods. “A while ago. I haven’t met with Daenerys here in a long time.”

“We’ve got nicer offices than editorial anyway.” Sansa forces a laugh, but Theon still looks like he might be sick as the elevator chimes pleasantly and opens onto the world of her job.

She’d planned to take Theon around a bit, try to impress him with the décor and the views, but the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and the bustle of the publicity department only seem to make him more nervous. It puts Sansa on edge, too, seeing his cockiness reduced to this, so she takes him by the arm and marches him resolutely through the rows of cubicles, avoiding the confused looks of her coworkers.

Brienne’s office is a small glass box tucked away in a corner. Sansa feels sharp relief as she steps through the doorway and ushers Theon in—he hadn’t passed out, and nobody had stopped him to ask anything that might set him off. But Theon stills in the doorway, his jaw dropping slightly.

“What? Are you—oh.”

In the late afternoon light, the skyline glitters, magical. Gold refracts off the silver of the Chrysler Building and fills Brienne’s office. Theon is staring slack-jawed at the tops of the buildings, the same gold light accentuating the planes of his face and illuminating auburn threads in his sandy hair. For the first time, Sansa realizes just how attractive he is under all the bluster and bravado.

“Nice, right?” she says. It comes out too high-pitched to sound casual like she’d intended.

Theon presses one palm cautiously to the glass. “You don’t see a view like this every day.”

It’s as if, as he catches the light, another unknown facet of Theon glints back at Sansa. This Theon is filled with boyish wonder, the kind she’d only ever glimpsed in him before. _How many layers are there to this man_?

“We have work to do,” she blurts out before she says something else decidedly less reasonable.

Theon sighs and pulls himself away from the glass. Sansa regrets it for a moment, worried that by breaking his trance, he’d snap back to his earlier reticence, but his face remains open as he turns to her.

“Right. Let’s get to it.”

-

They talk in circles for hours. They start on opposite sides of Brienne’s desk, Sansa’s hands folded primly atop the glass and Theon slouching in the armchair across from her; then they move to the couch, hoping to mirror the actual environment of Margaery’s television set; then, as the gold light slips down through the canyons formed by the buildings and washes the office in dusky purple, they end up on the floor, Sansa cross-legged with her heels discarded and Theon spread-eagled across the carpet.

It’s not that they aren’t making progress—Theon is _trying_ , Sansa can see it—it’s just such a difficult topic to dance around, and no matter which way Theon tries to spin back the question of the novel’s inspiration, it comes out sounding wooden. Even his pithy deflections, which Sansa knows come more or less naturally to him, land flat.

She can sense Theon growing more frustrated as time rolls on. Sansa is frustrated too, truth be told, but she’s found herself too personally invested now to chalk the interview up to a lost cause. It _is_ a big break, and one that he thoroughly deserves, and it’s probably not his fault that whatever is plaguing him causes him to stutter over this one topic. It doesn’t make the stilted answers any less agonizing, though.

When Sansa glances up after Theon hits yet another internal wall and goes silent, she sees that beyond the glass of Brienne’s office, the entire floor is empty and dark.

She had barely even noticed the time passing. With a groan, she pulls herself off the floor, stretching out her arms. “Come on. Get up.”

“What?” Theon says, his eyes a little too frantic. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No. We’re taking a break. Do you like pad thai?”

Sansa watches as Theon’s tense alertness drains away, his shoulders slumping inch by inch. What an odd reaction. For a moment, it almost looked like he was afraid of her. Without the concentration or the frustration, he just looks very tired.

“I can get coffee, too,” she adds. Theon looks up through his curls.

“Yeah,” he says weakly. “Those both sound nice.”

-

When she returns from the office kitchen with a cup of coffee belching acrid steam in each hand, Theon is curled up in a corner of Brienne’s pristine leather couch, his head propped up on one hand. He is staring blankly out at the skyline, which is lit up in shades of silver and white in the night sky, each window like a glowing artificial star.

“Here,” Sansa says softly, holding one of the mugs out. Theon takes it without looking at her.

“So, you want to give it another go?”

“No,” says Sansa, sinking down onto the opposite end of the couch. “I want to not think about it at all for a little while.”

“Oh.” Theon’s face cycles through relief, confusion, worry. “I’m sorry, Sansa, I really am trying—”

“How did you end up in New York?”

“What?”

He blinks, and in his surprise, his eyes finally land on hers. Sansa holds his gaze evenly.

“Did you grow up here? Nobody ever comes here by accident.”

“No, I…” He shakes his head. “My dad, he runs a shipping business out of Brighton Beach. He wanted me to come learn the ropes, so I left college and came here.”

“A shipping business? Like boats? That’s pretty far from being a writer.” Sansa laughs, but Theon’s expression is tense again, his knuckles wrapped so tightly around the mug that they pop white. “Okay, we don’t have to talk about that. Who’s your favorite author?”

“Lovecraft.”

Sansa gawks.

Theon shrugs. “I don’t know. He was kind of a shitty person. It’s not the way he writes, it’s the cosmic horror of it, you know?”

Sansa does not really know. She’d had a few brief encounters with Lovecraft her freshman year of college, and she’d had nightmares about smoky tentacles for weeks afterward.

“Is that where the whole extended squid metaphor thing came from?” she asks slowly.

God help her, Theon _beams_. His face lights up with excitement, the kind she’d never quite been able to tease out during their practice interviews, and he nods vigorously. “I was hoping people would get that. The fear of addiction, it’s just like the fear you get reading Lovecraft, where you’re scared because you can’t tell how big or powerful or dark this thing is, you just know it’s _there_ and then the only way to come to terms with it is to look it in the face and understand how massive it is, but that’s a hard fucking thing to do—y’know?”

She doesn’t, except maybe she does. Her skin crawls with phantom hands.

“Who’s yours?”

She startles. “My what?”

“Your favorite author.”

“Oh.” Sansa blushes and takes a long sip of coffee, then mumbles her answer into the mug. “Jane Austen.”

Theon chuckles a little. Sansa feels herself grow redder along with her indignation.

“She’s a classic writer,” she snaps. “I don’t know why you’re laughing.”

“I’m not laughing at you, I promise.” Theon stifles the chuckle but continues to grin. “It’s, I don’t know…sweet.”

Great. As if she wasn’t red enough before.

“You don’t really see love like that anymore. Not the way she wrote it.”

“No, you’re right. It’s a shame.” She notices, suddenly, that she and Theon are both leaning forward as they talk, slimming the gap between them on the small leather couch. She wonders if she should pull back, but she doesn’t want to disturb the strange, tenuous thread of electricity running between them.

“It’s why books are so important to me,” she says quietly, thinking she should probably stop before this goes somewhere that she can’t control, but she doesn’t think that she _wants_ to stop it. “No matter how bad it gets out here, what the world throws at you, you can always retreat into that world instead. It’s an escape to somewhere better.”

Theon traces the rim of his coffee mug with one finger, his lips slightly parted as if he’s on the verge of speech. Sansa watches and waits.

“The novel,” he begins, his voice low. “It’s not fiction, not really. I—”

The blare of an alarm cuts through his words, and Sansa jumps before realizing the noise is coming from her lap.

“Shit.” She _never_ swears, _especially_ not in front of authors, but Theon seems not to notice, even more lost than she is. “It’s probably the food. I’m sorry, Theon. Just—stay here for a minute.”

She jabs at the elevator button as if it’s done her a personal injustice. Whatever it was that he was about to say, it had sounded like a breakthrough—but it’s not even that making her want to rush back to him. It’s the thought of him finally beginning to open up to her, to maybe get the chance to understand a bit of Theon Greyjoy, that makes her dash through the lobby and snatch the food from the bewildered delivery guy before hurtling back up to floor thirty-five. She winds her way through the desolate cubicles toward the softly-glowing corner of light.

“Hey,” she says, bursting through the door. “Sorry about that.”

The look Theon gives her is so utterly beguiling that she nearly stops short. It’s…God, it’s _soft_.

“I have food,” she says, hoisting the bag into the air and feeling incredibly stupid.

“Glad you didn’t get lost while getting it.”

She wishes he would stop looking at her like that. She doesn’t really wish that, though.

They eat in silence for a few minutes, the sound of taxis and sirens filtering up from the street below, their lights casting strange colors across Theon’s face. The lingering end of his confession hangs over them, growing heavier every moment, until the tension becomes too much. Sansa puts her pad thai on the carpet.

“What were you going to say before?”

“Oh.” Theon looks meek suddenly—yet another word Sansa never would’ve thought she’d find using to describe him.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I get it. It just sounded important.”

“No. I mean…yeah, it is.”

He sighs, looks down, won’t meet her gaze. “Why do you always do that?” Sansa blurts out, and then nearly slaps a hand over her own mouth.

But he looks up, then, and _does_ meet her eyes, and she’s just as entranced as she was that first day in the café.

“The reason I can never answer that question about inspiration properly is because it’s bullshit. The junkie was me.”

Sansa inhales sharply but doesn’t let herself blink.

“My dad’s company—he was in debt to some really bad guys, and he had me deal with them as a way to, I don’t know, toughen me up or something. And this one guy, he had me running _favors_ as a way to pay off some of my dad’s debt, and even when I was getting beat up and mugged and shit I’d keep at it because I just wanted to impress my dad. To make him see that I wasn’t a waste like he thought I was. And Ramsay—the other guy, I think he probably had mob connections or something, to be honest—he’d bring me to all his parties as his bodyguard, kind of, except he’d call me his _pet_ and they were all doing God knows what kind of drugs and he’d always get me to try them, too, saying it’d help me forget all the pain from the punches or whatever had happened that day. So I did them, but I guess I did too much, and then one day I showed up in my father’s office all skinny and strung out and he was so disgusted that he just—he fired me, he cut me off, disowned me, whatever. Anyway. I had nowhere else to go, so I went back to Ramsay. And then, for a couple years, I just kind of…lost myself. I didn’t know who I was. I thought my name was fucking _Reek._ ” His voice cracks.

“Oh my god,” Sansa breathes, remembering the demonic conscience with the same name in Theon’s book.

“I couldn’t even get myself out of it. It was my sister. She came and hunted me down in whatever godforsaken gutter I’d ended up in and got me back on my feet. I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for her. It just…it broke me, really. I had never imagined how bad bodies could feel until then, that sensation of being trapped in your own body, you know? You probably don’t know. It’s weird.”

“No, I do,” Sansa says in a rush, because there it is, the description she’s been trying to find for years. “I know exactly and it’s terrible and you just want to be anywhere else, any _one_ else.”

He holds her gaze, silently nudging her to go on, and now _she’s_ the one having difficulty looking at him. “My ex-boyfriend,” she says, her throat so hoarse that the words are barely above a whisper. “He was…cruel. I do know. I really, really do know, Theon.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. Usually, Sansa hates it when people respond that way, stunned into silence and floundering for words. But he sounds sincere, and better yet, _looks_ sincere, those blue eyes transformed into endless storms and all that intensity focused on her.

“I’m sorry too,” she says, and scrubs the back of her hand across her cheek in case the pressure in her eyes made good on its promise to form into tears. “God, it’s just the oversharing hour in here, isn’t it?”

And then they’re both laughing—maybe they’re both crying a little too, Sansa knows she certainly is—but mostly laughing at the ridiculousness of it all, that they’re still nearly strangers and yet now they’ve got _this_ between them, tying them together in a way Sansa can’t even begin to think about right now. This time, when she leans forward, she doesn’t try to pull away.

When they’ve both finally fallen silent, Sansa says, “I think you should say it. If you’re comfortable with it.”

“What?” Theon’s brow creases.

“The truth, what the book is really about. And I don’t mean that as your publicist, I just think it’s important for other people to hear that it’s something you _can_ come back from, and you can make yourself whole again and come back brighter.”

“You think that?” One corner of Theon’s mouth quirks up, but it’s not so much a smarmy grin as a charming, genuine smile that erases the worry lines from his cheeks.

“I do. I think this is the kind of book that could change lives.”

“Okay.”

He reaches down for his abandoned cup of coffee, gulps the rest of it down, and squares his shoulders back to Sansa. “Let’s do it, then.”

-

They don’t meet the night before the interview. Sansa had been worried at first, when Theon told her that he didn’t think they needed to, that he was backing out—not just of their discussion from a few nights earlier, but from the entire thing. But after she sent a series of rather frantic emails to Theon, entirely forgoing his agent, he managed to convince her that he wasn’t about to catch a train to North Carolina just so she couldn’t drag him to the studio herself and, in fact, just wanted a night to ‘get the last stubborn bits of his shit together.’

It doesn’t stop her from being unreasonably nervous on the cab ride over to the Tyrell Network headquarters, though. Sansa is so nervous that she storms right past Margaery’s poor assistant on the way in, her eyes scanning the huge film set, already preparing excuses and apologies to Margaery for Theon’s tardiness. That is, until she sees a familiar head of sandy hair bobbing over the back of a couch.

“Theon,” she exclaims, and rushes over, ignoring the way that half of the people on set whip their heads around to stare at her. Theon turns more languidly, an easy smile on his face as he waves to her, though Sansa can see the anxiety clearly in his eyes as she nears him.

“Morning, Sansa,” he says, and stands to greet her. She pulls up short, suddenly unsure of what she’s supposed to do to greet him—hug him? high five him? shake his hand?—and uncomfortably aware of all the people still watching them. Theon freezes, too, before shrugging and pulling her into an awkward side-armed embrace for a moment.

He’s very warm, and he smells like cedar and salt, and his stubble brushes her cheek when he pulls away and she shivers. He is also ever-so-slightly trembling.

Before Sansa can ask him quietly if he’s okay, she hears the high trill of Margaery’s “good moooorning!” across the room, and she quickly backs away from Theon. Not that she had any reason to feel guilty about standing so close to him. But.

“Theon,” she says, smoothing down her pencil skirt, “this is Margaery Tyrell.”

Margaery grins bright as the sun and keeps her eyes on Theon even as she kisses the air next to each of Sansa’s cheeks. “So this is the man behind the talent!” she cries, laying a hand on Theon’s bicep. “I don’t know why Sansa isn’t getting you on every cable network from here to Seattle. You’ve certainly got a face for TV.”

“Lovely to meet you, Ms. Tyrell.” Theon chuckles— _chuckles,_ like some actor in a rom-com—and Sansa, to her dismay, feels her stomach lurch. She’s never been bothered by Margaery’s flirty demeanor before.

Margaery attempts to lead Theon off to the dark warren of rooms behind the set, probably to powder his face or pump him full of caffeine or something, but Theon pulls away from her to turn back to Sansa. “You’re gonna stay, right? The whole time?”

Sansa’s breath hitches.

“I’ll be right there,” she says, and points to the side of the set. “I wouldn’t leave eve if the ceiling came crashing down on us.”

“Good.”

His face crinkles in that genuine smirk again, and then Margaery’s whisked him away and Sansa takes a few deep breaths before she assumes her position at the side, right in Theon’s line of view.

-

Margaery doesn’t break out the tough questions until the end of the ten-minute segment. She and Theon start with some witty banter that sounds completely natural, trading little puns and flirts across the overstuffed teal couch at the forefront of Margaery’s morning set, and he answers all the questions about his life and writing process with more than the requisite amount of charm. Margaery was right—he _is_ made for TV, a publicist’s dream.

But when Margaery turns to him at eight and a half minutes, her usual lighthearted demeanor replaced with seriousness, and asks him how he managed to make such difficult subject matter sound so authentic, Sansa sees Theon falter.

It’s only a bit, his blue eyes flashing worry across the studio as his mouth opens without forming words, and Sansa goes still. He’d been doing so well, but a million people have his face beaming into their kitchen screens right now, and if he breaks like she saw him do that afternoon on the High Line, Sansa will have no way to stop it or protect him from whatever backlash might come.

His eyes dart around the room again, unfixed, but then they land on her and Sansa sees Theon steel himself.

“Well, Margaery, the truth is that it’s quite a bit less fictional than many people think. It’s based on my own struggles with addiction a few years ago, and writing this book has been my recovery. Writing it forced me to consider the darkest period of my life and move past it. To hear such a positive reaction to it from so many people gives me hope that this topic is becoming less stigmatized, and that anyone else in my situation will find it easier to get the help they need.”

Sansa breathes out all in a rush and hopes Theon can see her smile.

“Wow,” Margaery says softly. “It must take a lot for you to admit that.”

“I want people to know that it gets better,” Theon answers.

-

Three days later, Sansa is sitting in her cubicle, trying her best not to hurl her stapler at the wall as she exchanges a flurry of nonsensical emails with Bronn Blackwater’s agent, when Brienne’s head appears over the partition.

“Sansa? Got a moment?”

“Sure,” Sansa says warily.

Brienne leads her into her office, gesturing for Sansa to sit down on the couch, and Sansa does so, folding her hands primly across her knees. A flash of happiness like lightning surges through her, the memory of Theon standing at the window with his nose pressed to the glass, but her nerves at Brienne’s serious tone soon drown it out.

She’d done well with Theon—at least, she thought she had, because preorders were skyrocketing and she’d woken up the morning after the interview to three different media requests for him sitting in her inbox—but maybe it had been too much for daytime cable after all. Maybe she should have pulled him back instead of pushing him forward.

Brienne leans over the desk toward Sansa. “Maester and Company just put in an order for thirty thousand copies of _What Is Dead May Never Die_. They want to stock it nationwide.”

“Thirty thousand?” Sansa repeats faintly, her head swimming.

“Theon Greyjoy’s earned out half his advance already and the book hasn’t even been released yet. Sansa, that’s nearly unprecedented for a debut. NPR’s just called Petyr _begging_ him to get Theon into their place next week. I don’t know how you did it.”

She shakes her head slowly, but her eyes are beaming with pride and she’s smiling fondly at Sansa, as if she’d just passed a test with flying colors. Sansa bites her lip, a thrill of anticipation running through her.

“Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

“Not all of it.” Brienne shuffles a few papers on her desk before she pulls one out, emblazoned with the company logo. “Our romance imprint is looking for a new publicity coordinator, and I took the liberty of passing on your name. After whatever you did to whip Theon Greyjoy into shape, they said it’s yours if you want it.”

Sansa scans the paper, her eves roving nearly too rapidly to absorb the words. A pay raise, her own office, maybe an _assistant_ —and at the romance imprint as well, her days filled with bodice rippers and sweet fantasies. A dream if she’s ever heard it.

She leaves Brienne’s office dazed, the letter clutched in her hand, and goes to call her mom.

-

She shoots an email off to Theon at the tail end of the flurry she sends out. They haven’t really talked since the morning of Margaery’s show, only exchanged a few congratulatory notes through Theon’s agent, but Sansa feels that she _needs_ to tell him personally, especially since he had been such a big part of it.

And since she won’t be his publicist anymore. She’s saddened a bit by the thought, pulling away from him just as his star begins to shine, but Brienne had promised that she’d find someone capable of handling Theon’s idiosyncrasies and if she couldn’t, she’d do it herself.

What Sansa doesn’t expect is for her phone to light up mere minutes after sending the email, an unknown number flashing across the screen.

_amazing news, sansa. you deserve it. glad i could help ;)_

She bites her lip and texts back _Who is this_?

_wow, that’s cold. i’m not your client anymore and now suddenly you’re too big for me?_

_Theon_. She giggles—actually _giggles_ into the afternoon silence of the office—and then clamps her hand over her mouth before anyone else hears.

_I’d say you’re the one that’s too big for me now. How did you get my number?_

_a man has his ways,_ he texts back. And then, a moment later, _dany._

Sansa rolls her eyes and smiles.

_anyway, sounds like we’ve both got a lot to celebrate. drinks tonight?_

Her fingers fall still on the keypad, her mind suddenly turning. Sansa has rules about all of this, and one of those rules is that she doesn’t go to bars with her authors, doesn’t ever give them the wrong impression.

But Theon’s not her author anymore, is he?

Already, she’s sad at the prospect of never seeing him again, of flouncing off to her new job two floors below and leaving the truths they’d poured out to each other sealed away in Brienne’s office. She knows that her first instinct, upon seeing those words, wasn’t to think of her rules—it was to text back _yes,_ easily and quickly, as if he were a friend. And Theon’s right—they both have plenty to celebrate.

So she keys in _7pm?_ and hits send before she can hesitate any longer.

Almost immediately, a response bubbles up on the screen: _50 th and 6th, 63rd floor. _

It’s only after she’s turned her phone off so she can’t text Theon anything stupid and is looking up the bar online—oh _God_ , it’s fancy, she’s going to have to run home and grab a cocktail dress—that she lets herself think about the other reason it had been so easy to break her self-imposed rule. Theon might not be her author anymore, but she also doesn’t quite care if she’s giving him the wrong impression. In fact, the wrong impression doesn’t seem quite so wrong after all.

-

Sansa turns up to the bar ten minutes late, her hair still wet, and pauses at the elevator before getting in.

It’s not that she’s _nervous,_ per se, she just…wants to be ready. She doesn’t want to be caught off guard if something happens—does she want something to happen? Is that what she’s hoping for? What if she’s hoping and something _doesn’t_ happen and she’s misread the whole situation and she might make a fool of herself—

“Sansa.”

Quick, heavy footsteps, and then a hand at the small of her back. She jumps; Theon retracts it quickly, his eyes wide. “Hey, sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. You, uh…”

“No, don’t worry. You’re fine.” _Put your hand back, please._ She can still feel lingering warmth where he’d touched the silk of her dress.

Theon, too, seems a bit lost, his cocky demeanor lost to tapping fingers and a slightly open mouth. “You look really good, Sansa,” he says finally. Sansa bites her lip.

“You don’t clean up so bad yourself.” Without the leather jacket and the shades, a hint of golden-red scruff at his chin and shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, he looks older. Not in a bad way. She quite likes him like this, actually.

She gives him a soft smile, praying she hasn’t got lipstick on her front teeth, and is delighted when his hand returns to her back as he ushers her into the elevator.

The bar is dimly lit, full of blocky leather furniture and sweeping skyline vistas, the exact kind of place Sansa imagined herself in every night when she first moved to New York. They both gravitate to the south corner, where a small sofa faces the Chrysler Building.

“I’d pull out your chair, but…” Theon gestures at the couch and smiles crookedly. “I’ll have to make do with buying you a drink. What’s your poison?”

“Whoa there, I’m the one with the promotion. Shouldn’t I be buying?” Sansa laughs the sound a little too high-pitched to properly mask her breathlessness.

“And I’m the one who’s about to have some absolutely ridiculous royalty checks rolling in, thanks to you. This one’s on me.”

“Fine, but I’m returning the favor when you hit the _New York Times_ bestseller list.” Sansa ponders a moment, and then says “A cosmopolitan.”

Theon bursts out laughing. “I thought only middle-aged divorcees on vacation in Cancún ordered those.”

“I watched a lot of _Sex and the City_ in high school, okay? I always used to order them when I first moved here because I thought it’s what I was supposed to drink. I just wanted it to be like the movies.”

She expects him to laugh harder at this, but instead, Theon only smiles gently and shakes his head.

“You’re something else, Sansa Stark.”

When he returns from the bar, her luminously pink cocktail in one hand and some kind of amber liquid on ice in the other, Sansa straightens up and shifts over to make room for him on the couch. It’s small, and as they angle toward each other, their knees bump together. Electric currents run across Sansa’s skin.

“To new beginnings.” Theon raises his glass, and Sansa carefully clinks the rim of hers against it. The many meanings of his words swirl through her head.

“To new beginnings and brighter endings.”

They both take long pulls of their drinks. Sansa watches the light of the nighttime skyline splay across Theon’s scuffed shoes, his knees, his hands.

“So. The romance imprint.”

She nods, not even trying to quench the bubble of excitement that the reminder of her success brings to her lips.

“Finally getting to live out your Jane Austen fantasies?”

 _He remembered._ Sansa swirls her drink around inside the martini glass. “Yep. I don’t have time for any of it in real life, so I have to live it vicariously through work. That’s the real romance in my life, I guess.”

It’s not quite true, but it’s a common deflection she’s practiced over and over again, to the point that it might as well be. Theon, though, is giving her a searching stare that makes her want to look away.

“I don’t think that’s true,” he says softly.

“What?”

“The not having time part. I don’t think it’s enough to only have it on the page. Don’t you want it for yourself, too?”

“When it’s in a book—” She breaks off, trying to find a way to put it into words. “It’s…safe. You know they’ll get a happy ending and the monsters will all be vanquished and the knight won’t ever hurt the princess. You can control it.”

She feels hesitant heat at her knee, and sees his hand hovering above the black silk as if he’s afraid to touch her.

“You don’t have to always be afraid. They won’t all be like the one who hurt you, I promise.”

You _won’t be like that_.

Sansa takes a deep, staggering breath, says “okay,” and then leans in and kisses Theon Greyjoy.

He’s stiff with surprise for a moment, and Sansa worries that she’s horribly misjudged the entire situation, but then his hand comes down like an anchor on her knee and his other comes up to cup her cheek so gently it makes her ache. She feels stubble brush her jaw, a contrast against the softness of his lips; he tastes like whiskey and, beneath that, sea salt, and she feels a wave of comfort sweep over her. It’s electrifying, and yet at the same time, she’s safe.

Theon pulls back and presses his forehead to hers, their faces so close she can feel the flutter of his eyelashes. “Well,” he murmurs, and she waits for an answer, but he seems lost for words. She, for once, can’t find any either; all she wants to do is run her hands through his curls, taste the hollow of his throat.

Finally, he says “Fuck it. Want to come back to mine? We don’t have to if you’re not—”

“Theon.” She silences him.

For the first time in a very long time, Sansa feels safe enough to say yes.


End file.
